whole that is more than the sum of its parts. They can be made of common nouns (bus ride), proper nouns (Central Anatolia), or both (Galatia highlands). They can be “open compounds” (acid trip) or closed ones (daylight, slipstream). Compounding has been common throughout the history of English, but writers and their editors don’t always agree on when and whether to splice words together. (Theroux went with backseat, which is now Webster’s preferred form, but Raymond Carver and Richard Ford—in their short stories “Cathedral” and “Rock Springs”—prefer back seat.)
